Dallas Opera's high-tech Death and the Powers gears up for worldwide exposure

Dallas Opera's Death and the Powers gears up for worldwide exposure

The Dallas Opera presents Death and the Powers February 12-16 at Winspear Opera House, with the production's Sensor Chair remaining on display at Perot Museum through February 21.
Photo courtesy of Dallas Opera

The opera promises to be a memorable one, as it tells the story of a terminally ill billionaire who downloads his consciousness into “the System” and proceeds to use all his powers to persuade his loved ones to join him there.

The Dallas Opera is pulling out all the stops to make sure people stand up and take notice of this production. Sunday's performance will be simulcast to locations around the world:

The National Opera Center at Opera America in New York City

The San Francisco Conservatory of Music in San Francisco

The Industry at The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles

The Bing Concert Hall at Stanford University in Silicon Valley, California

Opera Philadelphia at The Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

The MIT Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts

The Royal Academy of Music in London, England

The University College of Opera and Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden

The performance will also be simulcast for free at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science, although the 298-seat Hoglund Foundation Theater has long since sold out. If you don't have a ticket, you still have a chance to get in, because the Perot is choosing people from a stand-by line to fill empty seats 35 minutes before the performance starts.

If standing in line isn't your thing, and you can't make any of the four performance — for which tickets are still available — don't fret. The stay of Death and the Powers will be extended, in a sense, with a display of the production's Sensor Chair at the Perot Museum as part of the museum's Engineers Week, taking place February 17-21.

The chair, created by the MIT Media Lab, is a unique way for people to interactively experience the world of opera. Anyone who sits in it finds that his movements, small or large, create a variety of operatic sounds accompanied by lights.

Those attending the opera can experience the chair in the Winspear lobby before it heads to the Perot's Texas Instruments Engineering and Innovation Hall.